The growing presence of Palantir in the UK is no longer just a procurement story. The company now holds roughly £600 million in public contracts across the NHS, the Ministry of Defence, local councils and policing, while two petitions calling for ministers to sever ties with the firm have drawn more than 229,000 signatures. The concern is not limited to cost or outsourcing. It is that a company built in the worlds of intelligence, surveillance and military analysis is moving deeper into some of the UK’s most sensitive institutions at the same moment its leadership is becoming more explicit about the kind of technological order it wants to build.

The immediate focus remains the contracts. Palantir leads the consortium behind the NHS Federated Data Platform, a £330 million deal intended to help hospitals and health bodies use operational data more efficiently. Fresh reports this week confirmed that the Metropolitan Police has held talks with Palantir about using its AI tools to automate intelligence analysis in criminal investigations, a move that would extend the company’s role further into UK law enforcement. That combination is the point: Palantir is no longer supplying niche software to distant corners of government, but becoming embedded in health, defence and policing all at once.

The larger issue, however, is not really the contracts themselves. It is what Palantir is, how it sees its own mission, and why that mission increasingly sits uneasily with democratic public life. WIRED reported this week that employees inside the company are beginning to question whether they are “the bad guys,” with current and former staff describing growing alarm over Palantir’s role in immigration enforcement, military operations and the broader moral direction of the firm.

According to their report, internal Slack discussions featured employees questioning leadership decisions, the legality of how some data is used, and whether the company’s rhetoric has drifted toward something more openly authoritarian. That finding suggests the unease around Palantir is no longer confined to activists, privacy campaigners or hostile politicians. It is now present inside the company itself.

That unease has been sharpened by Palantir’s own public messaging. Last weekend, the company published a 22-point “mini manifesto” derived from The Technological Republic, the recent book by chief executive Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska. The text argued that Silicon Valley owes a “moral debt” to the United States, that the next era of deterrence will be built on AI, and that American technology companies should be building advanced AI weapons rather than hesitating over military work.

It also described some cultures as “middling” or “harmful” and promoted a harder vision of civic duty and strategic power. This is not the language of a neutral software supplier. It is the language of a company that sees itself as part of a political and civilisational project.

In the UK, MPs and campaigners have reacted sharply. Liberal Democrat MP Martin Wrigley said Palantir’s manifesto, which he said embraced AI state surveillance and national service, was either “a parody of a RoboCop film” or “a disturbing narcissistic rant.” Another MP, Victoria Collins, said it sounded like “the ramblings of a supervillain.” Those are vivid lines, but they are not merely performative. They reflect a wider fear that Palantir is no longer even pretending to separate its technology from a much broader ideological vision of power: one built around surveillance, militarisation, elite technical authority and a very thin patience for democratic hesitation.

Across the West, governments are moving closer to giant tech firms in the name of efficiency, modernisation and national security. Palantir does not present itself as a passive infrastructure provider. It presents itself as a participant in strategic struggle, a builder of tools for hard power, and a company impatient with the older liberal instinct to keep technology, coercion and public life at arm’s length. Fortune’s reporting summarised that shift clearly, and WIRED’s angle suggests even employees are no longer comfortable with where that logic leads.

What happens when more and more of a country’s governing infrastructure is handed to a company whose own ambitions sound, in the words of one MP, like those of a “supervillain”? The danger here is structural. The larger the contracts become, the stronger the incentives to draw yet more of public daily life into systems that can be tracked, integrated, analysed and acted upon: health, policing, borders, welfare, administration, and defence. While each step individually may sound like boosts to efficiency and convenience for the UK government, they all create more dependency, less public visibility, and more power for a private US firm whose priorities appear to be rooted elsewhere.

At some point, the UK getting “better data” means the country’s most sensitive functions are controlled, monitored and managed by an overseas superpower, with the real consequences filtering downward into the ordinary conditions of private life.